"Laptops?" Esme asked. "Like dogs?"
"I'll explain to you later," I assured. "We should keep moving."
"I forgot to tell you. The name of this campsite," Betty the Elder said, "is Possum's Pass." She waited to see if that was giggle-worthy. It wasn't.
We continued north and to the left, snaking through the trees until we came to one more spot, just like the others, also with latrines. By now, the novelty had worn off for the girls.
"And this is Deer End," Betty Sr. announced.
"Deer End?" Ava began to laugh. "Like Rear End?"
"It might've been something else," Betty Sr. muttered.
"Girls," I said, "just focus on taking notes."
Betty Sr. scowled as if she didn't like the giggling. "Come on. Let's check out the pool."
"You have a pool? Yay!" Inez and the Kaitlyns pumped their fists in the air.
"It's a nice one too!" Esme smiled.
We walked farther west and came upon a large, open field with a cinderblock building surrounded by a fence. We could just make out a pool.
The girls started running and to my surprise, began scaling the fence like ninjas. Hilly joined them, and soon they were all on the other side, where they stopped dead at the pool's edge. They just stood there, staring while we walked around to the other side, entering through a gate by the building.
"Wow," Betty Jr. said.
I wasn't sure what I'd expected. Maybe murky water full of turtles or frogs. Perhaps completely empty but for some puddle of rainwater. I wasn't prepared for this.
The pool was filled with round mud balls.
"The armory," Esme pointed out.
"The…these are weapons?"
"Well of course, dear. How can we defend ourselves from Boy Scouts or the commies?"
She reached in and pulled out a perfectly shaped sphere of dirt. So this was how they spent all their time.
"Watch this!" She threw overhand, but the dirt clod only travelled straight down a few inches from her shoes. She frowned. "Well, I used to be able to throw a lot farther."
"We can make you a trebuchet." Betty Jr. rubbed her chin. "I'm working on one at home as a booby trap for my brother's room. But I think we could build a huge one here."
Lauren explained, "Betty's studying medieval warfare. She's made a whole suit of armor out of dry macaroni!"
The other girls nodded as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say. Of course, with Betty, it really was. Betty had gone through a few other phases recently, including one where she spoke in 1920s noir gangster slang, and a ninja phase.
"That would be good." Betty Sr. brightened. "We have some trees that fell down recently. We can use them."
"So you made all of these?" I waved at the tens of thousands of mud balls in the pool.
"Of course," Betty the Elder said. "And it's a good thing it's been a dry summer or this would be a big rectangle of mud."
"We haven't figured out how to weaponize something like that yet," Ada added.
"Have you had a chance to use it?" Hilly wondered as she picked up a mudball the size of a grapefruit.
She tested its weight in her right hand then hauled back and threw it. It soared over the fence until it hit a tree, where it promptly exploded. The girls jumped up and down, cheering. Hilly squinted after it and sighed.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It didn't go very far." She sounded and looked disappointed.
"What are you talking about?" I gaped. "That's at least 500 feet!"
Hilly looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "I've always hit 600."
While I dazedly tried to figure out if that was possible, Betty tugged on the assassin's shirt. "You shouldn't feel bad. That stupid tree blocked it. It would've gone much farther."
For a moment, I was surprised. This was something I'd expect from one of my nicer Scouts, who couldn't bear to see anyone upset. Betty, while considerate of her friends, didn't usually comfort people.
"Thanks, kid." Hilly clapped the girl on the back with a smile.
"No problem," Betty said with a smile that threw me even more off guard. Something was up.
"You ever see jai alai played?" Hilly asked. "They throw balls using a cesta or hand basket thingy."
Betty Jr. froze. "They play that in the Basque region." Her voice was reverent. "Yes! We have to do that!"
"We could train so we could throw it with lethal force." Betty Sr. nodded.
Esme added, "We can weave the baskets! We've got the vines!"
My Betty punched her fist into her hand. "If we use the C-4 Hilly has, we'd be unstoppable!"
"I can make targets," Laura suggested. "We can make them look like Boy Scouts…"
"…or commies!" Ada clapped.
The ladies seemed interested in the possibilities as I made a mental note to go through Hilly's backpack when we returned and confiscate anything that would turn these women into a scary Iowa militia.
Hilly dropped to the ground, and after smashing a mud ball and flattening it on the concrete, she started to draw. "This is what a cesta looks like."
Then she began to explain how jai alai was played. And while Betty's eyes grew large over the idea of communing with her precious Basques, I was suspicious of certain attributes of Hilly's version of the game, which included mowing down the competition…with machine gun fire.
"I hate to interrupt, but we should get going," one of the Sharons said. "We have two more stops before we have to get back for dinner."
Still in the clearing, maybe one hundred yards away, was the last campsite. It looked just like all the others, with the exception that it was surrounded by a clearing instead of closed in by trees.
"This is Goldfinch Grave," Ada announced.
"Grave?" Lauren and Ava gasped.
"Well, none of us can remember the real name, and we had a misfortune with a flock of goldfinches, so we just came up with this."
I had to ask. "A misfortune?"
Esme eyed Betty Sr. uncomfortably. "It wasn't her fault. The box had faded. She didn't know she'd put out rat killer. She thought it was bird food."
My troop grew deathly silent.
"Oh, rat poison is great for killing things." Hilly nodded. "Once in Barcelona, I was pursuing a group of Portuguese Nazis and…" Her voice died off. Normally such a story would've been a hit with my troop, and she wondered why they weren't cheering her on.
Unfortunately for her, my girls were obsessed with animals, and the adorable black and gold state bird was no exception.
"Did you build little graves for them?" Lauren asked quietly.
"Of course. Want to see?" Laura led us behind the back platform tent, and sure enough, there was a little, well-tended graveyard with ten little stones with RIP painted on them, draped with flowers. Upon closer inspection, each little stone had a name, complete with back story.
For example, Stumpy Pete was a cowboy finch who lost his right arm in a cattle stampede and was visiting family in Iowa. Howling Hannah was an opera singing finch who was just about to go on a European tour until her untimely demise. And Ginsberg Goldfinch was a poet who wrote I saw the best birds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, feathered, flying themselves through the Blue Jay skies, looking for a bird seed fix, that, it turns out, was really rat poison. The end…and his too.
I looked up at Esme, who beamed. "I was going to be an American Lit major. 'Howl' was my favorite poem."
"We felt pretty bad after," Laura interjected. "But we had a ceremony and everything, and then we put the rat poison in something that we'd remember what it's for. That all happened in 1974."
Hilly nodded. "You'd be surprised how well rat poison can hold up over the years."
The Kaitlyns wrote something down. I needed to review their notes before we turned them in.
"What did you put it in?" I asked.
"I don't remember." Laura frowned.
"And last but not least"—Betty Sr. pointed to a shimmering surface in the dista
nce—"the lake!"
The girls broke into a run. They loved canoeing and kayaking. I kept pace with the older ladies out of respect of course and not because I couldn't run that fast, and soon we came to the shore. It was beautiful. Dragonflies skimmed the surface as butterflies frolicked in among the wildflowers that dotted the shore.
"It's stunning!" I said.
"We have a boat house." Betty Sr. seemed pleased for the first time since we'd arrived.
A large, wooden building was off to our left. To my surprise, it was filled with four aluminum canoes. A row of wooden oars lined one wall, and fishing tackle rested on shelves.
"There's not a lot of fish in there," Ada said. "They used to stock it. But no one has in years."
"Fifty years," Ava corrected.
"Can we swim in it?" Inez asked.
"We can," Ada answered. "But we have to be careful of Old Eisenhower."
"Old Eisenhower?" The Kaitlyns said the name as if it was completely foreign to them…which, unless they liked history from the 1950s, probably was.
"Yes. We are guessing from his size and movements that he's a two-hundred-pound snapping turtle." Ada pointed to what looked like a giant rock sitting on a huge log that stuck out of the water on the other side of the lake.
Just then, the rock slid into the water, and we saw a disturbingly large snout break the surface as it swam toward us.
"He's pretty vicious," Esme said. "You should stay away from him. He really likes fingers." Just then she held up her hand, which appeared to be missing the two middle fingers.
The girls screamed. Esme laughed and held up her middle fingers. "Just joshing. But he really will try to eat you."
"Can you transport him?" Hilly asked. "I might have a use for Old Eisenhower. I'd bring him back."
I was just wondering how when the turtle's snout submerged. A ripple across the water told me he was getting closer.
"We should probably go," Betty Sr. said. "Turtles are slow, but just to be safe, we should move on."
As we wound our way back along the path, the girls struck up conversations with their counterparts. The Kaitlyns were explaining to the Sharons how weird it was that I could never tell them apart either. Inez and Esme were talking about weaving the basket cestas. Ava was explaining the finer points of the need for the women to be insured and asked if they could still vote for her for mayor. Lauren and Laura were discussing snapping turtle behavior with Lauren using her junior zookeeper knowledge. And Betty and Betty were discussing the size of the trebuchet needed to fend off Communists.
"I really could use a snapping turtle," Hilly repeated as we walked.
It was time to figure out our threat level. "Hilly," I said, "did you know Maria Gomez?"
Hilly stopped in her tracks. "Maria?" She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. I didn't like it.
I pressed, "Did you work with her when she was in the CIA?"
"Nope," she said a little too quickly.
"Did you know anything about her?"
Again, Hilly answered too quickly to have considered the question. "Maybe. I can't remember."
There was a snapping sound off to our immediate left. It took everything I had not to look. If Maria was there, I didn't want to draw attention to her. Hilly looked.
"Why do you ask?" she said, still staring into the woods.
"No reason. She was a good friend of mine. I just didn't know if you knew her."
Hilly turned and gave me that bizarre look again. "You were friends? Like you are with me?"
I couldn't tell if she was interested or hurt.
"You and I have a different dynamic. But Maria did help me with the girls once in Washington DC."
"So…" Hilly said slowly. "The girls liked her? Like, really liked her?"
"Yes." I seized the opportunity. "They really like her. They'd be upset if anything happened to her."
Hilly processed this. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Yeah. Okay."
Okay like she wasn't going to try to kill Maria now if that was her end goal? Or okay like Hey, I like giant snapping turtles now? Hilly was very hard to read sometimes.
"What's for dinner?" the Kaitlyns asked the Sharons in unison.
"Want to help?" they asked back.
This was going to get old quickly.
Back at the lodge, Hilly wandered off over to a nearby tree, and I sat down on one of the logs and watched her. She shoved her right hand into her pocket, and I thought I heard a snap. The woman didn't flinch as she pulled a mousetrap from her pocket with her fingers trapped under the wire. She laughed before pulling it off and tossing it into the woods.
"Hilly?" I shouted. "Did you just have a mousetrap in your pocket?"
Hilly laughed. "That Betty! She got me good!"
Betty? My Betty? I remembered her tugging on Hilly's shirt earlier. So that's what she was up to. But why did she put a mousetrap in her pocket? Why did she bring one with her on this trip?
"Doesn't it hurt?" I said as I ransacked my backpack for the first aid kit.
Hilly shook her head. "Don't worry. I'll get her back."
I froze. "You'll get her back?"
"Sure! It's just a game we're playing." The assassin rolled her eyes. "I won't maim her or anything."
"Um…" I closed up my backpack. "I don't think that's a good idea." Pitting a seasoned assassin against a little kid? "Who's idea was this?"
Hilly plucked a cicada off of a tree. "She started it, so I guess this is her idea."
She cocked her head to the side as she spoke quietly with the cicada perched on her finger. The woman bred beetles, so it sorta made sense. I wondered what she was saying to the captive bug.
"Your friend is pretty weird," Betty Sr. said before spitting a cricket four feet away.
"Did you just spit a cricket?" I asked before I could stop myself. "From your mouth?"
She rolled her eyes. "Oh, like you don't do that in the future."
For a second, I wasn't sure how to react to that. "I'm not sure we've ever done it at any time."
She threw her arms into the air. "What's the fuss? It's still alive!"
I couldn't get my head around an elderly Girl Scout hermit who spits live crickets thinking a CIA assassin who talked to cicadas was weird.
I looked over at Betty Jr., who'd just built a tiny trebuchet out of sticks and was getting ready to aim it at a cluster of tiny stick people and thought maybe out of all of us, that girl was the most sane.
Betty Sr. spit another cricket about six feet this time. It was still alive I noted as it hopped away. I don't know how she held two in her mouth without me seeing it, but the increased range was impressive.
CHAPTER TEN
"Let's check the kaper chart to see who's got dinner duty," Ada announced as she handed me a piece of bark with writing on it that looked like soot.
"You've already got our names on there?"
Ada looked at me as if I was insane. I was kind of wondering that too. "Of course. It's all about being prepared, and a leader is always organized. The Sharons and Kaitlyns have dinner duty. Ava, Esme, Inez, and I will handle cleanup."
"What about us?" I indicated Hilly and myself as Chad and Riley joined us.
Ada eyed the men suspiciously. "Can they get firewood?"
"Of course." I turned to Riley. "Dry wood of all sizes. We'll need small stuff for the kindling up to large logs for the fuel. Got it?"
Riley slapped Chad on the shoulder. "Sure. Be back soon."
As they wandered into the woods, I wondered if that wasn't a bad idea. What if they ran into Maria? Spies can be a skittish lot, and they spook easily. It's a valuable skill that keeps us nice and paranoid so we don't get busted.
One time in Georgia…the country, not the state, I was supposed to pick up a file hidden in a tree trunk in a city park at midnight. My contact had gone AWOL and my spydy senses were going off. So, instead of going to that particular tree, I hung out in the branches of one nearby and wa
ited. Sure enough, four goons showed up at midnight and stood guard over the tree.
They stayed a whole hour. I followed them back to what, to my surprise, turned out to be headquarters for Tree Lovers of Georgia. They had just randomly chosen that spot to guard trees that night from some dubious threat. My concern that I was being watched, albeit from a different organization altogether, kept me from getting caught.
By the way, I didn't see that contact until a few years later, when I ran into him at a Save the Sauna fundraiser in Oslo. He apologized for his disappearance all those years ago and said he now lived under a different identity as a manager for the Sloth Census in Belize. I wonder if he'd let me bring the troop to visit sometime.
"What should we do?" Hilly now had three cicadas sitting on her right shoulder.
"I guess we get the time off." Since she was distracted by bugs, I decided to ask her, "What do you think the deal is with Chad?"
Hilly transferred one of the cicadas to my shoulder for some reason. "Are you asking for my professional opinion or my gut feeling?"
I ignored the insect. "Aren't they the same?"
"Of course not. If they were the same, they'd be called the same thing!" Hilly laughed.
"Okay…both."
She picked the cicada off of my shoulder and put it back on hers. "Both what?"
I held up my hands to stop her as she tried to put another bug on my shoulder. "I'd like your professional opinion and your gut feeling."
"Well…" Hilly looked in the direction the men had gone. "My professional opinion is that Chad is some loon who followed you here."
"But he was on the hilltop when we got there," I pointed out.
Hilly transferred the three cicadas to the palm of her hand. "He probably ran ahead."
It was an interesting theory. "How would he have known where we'd end up?"
"He must've gotten lucky." She transferred the bugs to the top of her dark hair.
I tried not to stare at them. "So you don't believe he was kidnapped, questioned about some woman, and dumped there."
"No. My gut tells me someone dragged him off the street, threw him in a van, asked him some hard questions, and when he didn't answer, left him on that hilltop for dead."
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